Comments Which Conservatives Block From Their Blogs For May 13, 2015

May 10

To R. Scott Clark and his 1987 blogpost quote about how, because of a lack of honesty and basic literacy, our nation is in the dark. This appeared in Heidelblog.


With nation's history of how it has treated nonwhites, haven't we always been in the dark regardless of our literacy abilities?

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To Joseph Sunde and his blogpost on John Witherspoon's recommendations for how to contribute to society. This appeared in the Acton blog.

Whitherspoon shows a good path for Christians, but is this what we should expect nonChristians in our society to do as well? And if so, where is our freedom of religion? For if this is the only hope we Christians hold out to society, especially with our own history of mistreating others and our love of money and prosperity, we will rightfully be seen as seeking privilege and rank over others.

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To Joe Carter and his blogpost on the need for an international police force to help persecuted Christians and others. This appeared in the Acton blog.

We need to ask a couple of questions here. First, will a police force be sufficient in protecting persecuted Christians or do need a paramilitary force? Second, will we support the police when they are called on to protect Palestinians and Bedouins from Israel's constant grabbing for more land and resources? Third, when we will we reflect on how our foreign policies contribute to the persecution of any group that could be associated with the West? After all, not only have we blindly supported Israel's occupation, we have supported coups and tyrants serving as proxies heads of state. And in Africa, our main concern regards how many natural resources we can extract while maximizing our own profits.

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To Joe Carter and his blogpost on liberal morality with its emphasis on property rights. This appeared in the Acton blog.

I found the article cited to be extremely disingenuous and deliberately lacking in self-reflection. These characteristics could be boiled down to following line about why some oppose capitalism:

Stop us before we make everyone richer, healthier and safer, they seem to be pleading.

Of course statistics will be quoted on how many more people can now live on more than a $1/day than before. Those statistics fail to distinguish where those greatest gains have been made. China, which is hardly a capitalist country has shown the largest gains. And the selected statistics are silent about the costs that such gains have incurred in a number countries such as the increased use of sweatshop and trafficked labor and further destruction of the environment found in either the extraction or use of fossil fuels, And another set of statistics that are ignored are the growing number of people in nations like the US who are approaching a poverty level income while the vast  percentage of wealth gained in the recovery since 2008 have gone to the upper 1%. And now we are getting close to another trade agreement that robs nations, including ours, of their national sovereignty--the TPP.

And what is important about the blind acceptance of Capitalism here is that it carries with it its own treacherous form of materialism--that is according to Martin Luther King Jr.  And this leads our society to being 'thing-oriented' society. And, according to King, for as long as this thing-oriented society with its emphasis on gadgets, profits, and property rights are more important than people, then evils such as racism will forever remain. And here is the unreported King. For as long as we can consider racism as a separate entity from our values economy, we will be more than happy to address. But which conservative will follow King in associating our drive for profits and emphasis on property rights with racism? Which one?

While Carter is singing 'The Sunny Side of The Street,' invisible stakeholders, invisible to those who benefit most from the status quo, are trying to tell us something their personal experience about our Capitalism. And we have a choice here. Either we can look at our own circumstances and deduce that everybody benefits from today's neoliberal capitalism, or we can listen and even visit these people they live and do an inductive study on how Capitalism is helping/hurting others.